On 09/02/2010 23:37, Greg Smith wrote: [snip] >> So the logical choice is plain LGPL3. I am open to motivated >> suggestions about other >> licenses but I'll ignore such crap as "BSD is more open than LGPL". >> > > I agree with your general logic and while I can't speak for everyone, I > would be happy enough with a LGPL3 licensed psycopg (obviously > addressing the usual OpenSSL mess) to pull the license issue off the top > of the list as a major problem preventing broader deployment of > psycopg. The main two points of contention seemed to be your unique > customizations to the license, which make a lot of legal people nervous, > and even worse that they were so clearly limiting many types of > commercial use. I hope you'd appreciate that while you have have > legitimate reasons for your license choices, ones in that form are > likely to remind this community of the split open/commercial licenses as > seen in products like MySQL, and we've watch that combination lead > toward a less open community than this one wants to be.
As I said before I agree that a license that grow so many exceptions during its lifetime is bad and I am ready to change it. But note that it never intended to be a split open/commercial license: the final phrase is just an acknowledgment that some companies will always ask for a customized proprietary license, no matter the actual license [ok, unless the actual license is BSD ;)] > As for arguments against the LGPL, the main one I care about is that > you're more likely to have businesses who hire people adopt a product if > it's BSD or MIT licensed. I make a decent chunk of my living doing > support and customization work on open-source projects. Anything that > has a GPL license attached is something I'm less likely to incorporate > into custom project work I do, because it decreases the number of > businesses who are then interested in it. This is mainly because they > have to incorporate all that background into their "credits" list for > aggregate works, and that concern inevitably opens up more questions > better avoided about the implications of the software being bundled. > > I'm more concerned about increasing the market I can provide such > solutions to than I am about people stealing my work, crediting me, or > not sharing their own customizations. So my preference for BSD-ish > licenses is a pragmatic one rooted in business goals. If you wanted to > improve your odds of companies adopting psycopg for projects that might > then lead to them hiring you for support or improvements to the > software, I'd suggest that using the GPL or even the LGPL is actually > doing the exact opposite of that. If your goals are more about > releasing proper free software in the original Stallman inspired sense > of the word, the LGPL3 might be exactly the right license for you. I understand this. In fact my goals are more about releasing free software than having companies hiring us for psycopg development. And sincerely I don't care about people "stealing my work" but I do care about customers (even not related to me) receiving free software and be correctly informed of their rights when the product is based on free software. That's why we (as a company) release all our software as GPL or LGPL. (Note that I don't have any problems with other licenses, for example when sending patches for products we use. It is just that I better like copyleft licenses for software I write myself.) So, be it. Next version of psycopg2 will be released using LGPL3 (plus ssl exceptions) and I hope this would solve all current licensing problems. [snip] > If the license issues get sorted out as you plan, that part I think we > can end up helping out with using our infrastructure. You might note > Marko Kreen already created http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Psycopg to > start working on just that. I think we'd all be fine with continuing to > expand on that rather than worry about your revamping the initd.org site > just to address the documentation goals we have. And we would certainly > want to work more closely with you and your other contributors on that, > to make sure everything is accurate and complete. initd.org will get a facelift first or later. But even if we could have a psycopg web page ready tomorrow having a page dedicated to psycopg on wiki.postgresql.org is great. Also, piro is doing a great work on psycopg2 documentation: http://piro.develer.com/psycopg2-doc/ make sure to check it out. federico -- Federico Di Gregorio f...@initd.org I porcellini di terra sono davvero Crostacei! Non lo sapevo! Certo che sono crostacei, hanno la crosta! Allora la pizza รจ un crostaceo?! -- discorso all'ESC2k07
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